Nothing reminds you that you've been taking the Sea and Cake for granted quicker than listening to a new Sea and Cake album. When they play together, John McEntire, Sam Prekop, Archer Prewitt, and Eric Claridge occupy an indie rock niche all their own, and their utter consistency at turning out well-wrought, prettily cerebral records might help explain why they've never met a hype cycle that paid them any mind in spite of the quality of their music. Trends come and go, but the Sea and Cake are more or less constant, and have been for almost 20 years. Even when what they do comes into vogue, as it has a few times, they seem to be left out of the think pieces because they're not new.
Dispositionally, their music sits in an open-air bar on a beach in St. Kitts, but sonically, it sits on a beach between Lake Shore Drive and Lake Michigan, with an occasional chill in the breeze blowing off the water. Sam Prekop's voice is a breathy wisp that champions tone over diction, and as such it fits in with the self-effacing playing of his bandmates. Listening to the gorgeously captured sounds on Runner, the band's 10th LP (counting last year's relatively concise The Moonlight Butterfly), it's clear that these are highly accomplished musicians, but there's not a single moment where all that prodigious technique isn't kept on a tight leash. Prewitt might unleash a ragged and fiery lead on "Skyscrapers" after the first verse, but McEntire's neat and orderly production keeps it from raising the temperature of the song too much.
For a lot of bands, that kind of imposed restraint might be suffocating-- oddly, it helps this group's music breathe. "Harps" is practically all breath, a song so light it feels as if the slightest gust could snatch it away-- Prewitt's e-bowed guitar part gives it a sort of Berlin-period Bowie vibe, and McEntire's crisp drums are its only ballast. It's easy to just let the album play and fill the room while you do something else, but a close listen reveals a lot of thought and care in the way these songs are constructed. One of the most startling left turns on the album comes when "The Invitations" transitions unexpectedly from a normal, breathy Sea and Cake song into a sort of beachy, droney disco track halfway through.
Runner shakes out as one of this band's most subtly varied albums, and it can be an immersive listening experience if you give yourself over to it. Outside of "Harps" and the energetic opener, "On and On", the songs work more on a textural and sensory level than as melodically memorable set pieces, but this does nothing to diminish their beauty or the craft evident in their construction, nor the fact that this is the kind of music that can wrap you up easily in something as simple as a compelling chord sequence, as it does on the title track. The Sea and Cake may never be the thing that everyone is talking about, but here, they're as reliable as ever, and that has its own kind of value.
